Concept for Ordering Food Through Android TV

It’s game night and you’re with all of your friends having fun. However, all of you are starting to get hungry and decide to get Dominoes. The question is what specifically to get. What pizza toppings? Do we want wings? Are there any deals? We crowd around this phone screen trying to read the small text and prices. This has happened to me personally a few times, and it’s frustrating. While mobile works in some cases, a personal device for being on the go, it can be difficult when you’re staying in one place with many people.

Joe Birch, an Android TV developer, has posted an article on Medium showing off this concept. His screenshots show an Android TV app for Dominoes where users can order food on a large, easy-to-see device and seamlessly make payments.

Using the new picture-in-picture feature, users can continue to watch a show while opening up the Dominoes app on their TV. Each item is available as it’s own card using the Leanback library and uses minimal text. After everyone finishes ordering, the payment can be made with Android Pay. Then the video can be maximized back to fullscreen to continue watching.

The flow in the article is really nice and I can definitely see the use of it. Android Pay makes it easy to confirm a payment on your TV without having to enter your credit card information publicly, and it can automatically populate your address for the delivery.

While TV has been seen primarily for music and video, there are plenty of opportunities for developers to explore this new form factor for other uses such as ordering food. I look forward to seeing other developers play around with TV as well. What kind of apps do you think will work well on a TV? Let us know in the comments below.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.